Conventionally, an image forming apparatus such as an electrophotographic copier forms an image on a paper through a cyclic process involving charging, exposure, development, transfer and fixing. Moreover, the image forming apparatus is maintained by a service person, who is informed of an abnormality in the image forming apparatus by the user by telephone when the abnormality occurs and then goes to the place where the apparatus is installed to confirm the condition. Moreover, each service person takes charge of the maintenance of a plurality of image forming apparatuses.
Moreover, recently, in order to further improve serviceability, a measure using the image forming apparatus in an online status (status of being connected to a communication line such as an internet) and automatically sending the state of a machine and error-relevant information to a service center by utilizing the communication line when the exception of the image forming apparatus was detected was also adopted. For example, a model, a number, the occurrence moment of an error, the state of the machine, and the like, are announced, and the fault diagnosis of the machine is carried out by utilizing these information.
Moreover, in the fault diagnosis process, for example, data for statistical (statistical data) acquired from the plurality of image forming apparatuses and the state of each machine are compared to judge a fault position. However, the following problem always exists, that is, the following problem that the statistical data which should be classified to treat according to a destination and a terrain are mixed into one exists. That is, the image forming apparatus is set the initial values of different action-relevant setting values according to the different destinations, and further, the setting values are different due to the different terrains.
Moreover, the service man can modify the setting value of the machine from a status during the delivery from a factory corresponding to the use frequency and the purpose of the machine, and sometimes, can wrongly set an unexpected value, and in this way, the error of the machine can be caused. Therefore, it is effective that the extent to which the setting value of the machine deviates from a general value can be prompted to the user, and if the initial value of the setting value and the territoriality are not considered, an effective result cannot be acquired.
When the image forming apparatus is maintained, the quantity of machines in an offline status (status of being not connected to the communication line such as the internet) on the market is still quite large. In addition, even though the machine can be connected to the communication line such as the internet, due to a problem on a safety aspect, there are still many machines (for convenience, hereinafter, calling the machine in the status as “machine in the offline state”) which do not provide machine information.
Therefore, a method which can carry out the maintenance of the image forming apparatus by collecting the machine information and carrying out proper analysis processing based on the collected machine information even for the machine in the offline status is expected. Moreover, the maintenance is not limited to the image forming apparatus, and the same maintenance is also expected for various information processing apparatuses in the offline status.